If there's an "Fwd:" in the subject line - instant termination of file. No I don't want to see Brittney Spears naked, no I don't need a new car loan, no I don't care about bad luck if not sent to 10 other people in 10 minutes, no I don't want to be a stud with Viagra, no I don't need to know the top ten dirty pick-up lines to use for Valentines Day, no I don't want 'instant credit', no I don't want to "be a model or just look like one" ... I could go on for weeks with all the garbage taking up space out there!
brother Zo

I used to use procmail, that is until my ISP a) lost all of
my files including my .procmailrc and .procmail dir (not backed
up at home -- bad, scain, bad) in a disk crash,
and 2) disallowed shell logins. Ever since then, I just haven't
had the energy to reconstruct it all over ftp.

outlook_express->Tools->Message Rules->Mail->push(&delete while ($to !~ /chady.net$/i || $subject =~ /^Fwd:/i));He who asks will be a fool for five minutes, but he who doesn't ask will remain a fool for life.

I do all my mail processing including filtering with
Gnus on
emacs. I am happy with my current setup and too lazzy
to learn new filtering programms, even if they are better.
To be honest
Mail::Audit seems to be pretty nice and I hope
one day I will find some reasons to study and use it.

Hanamaki...wondering if he is the only person who edits his ".emacs"
and ".gnus" files with
Nvi.

I've used Mail::Audit since Simon wrote about it in tpj. I don't use it to filter or move mail, but instead to write the headers to a small log I keep and then to redirect the headers to festival which announces the new message over my speakers.

The module makes it easy, though I had to hack the version I have (1.3) to include grabbing the emails' date.

I use a combination of procmail with my own and the SpamBouncer recipe set which filters everything into folders (direct-to-me, mailing lists, and possible and most likely spam); I typically read everything that I accept but still peruse the possible spam folders because there's enough people that contact me for spam-haven-ISPs that I need to follow up on those.

Of course, I've been having a much easier time with spam since I've started using weak-munging of my email and use of forwarding addresses on my email server. Most people that contact me often know the right address to use; everything else that comes in as spam is on one of the munged-addresses.

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com
||
"You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

I'm surprised that not so many people use procmail. I thought virtually 'everyone' on a *nix box used it. :)

As for spam filtering, if my address is not in the to: or cc: (i.e bcc), the mail goes to the spam box. Likewise for ALL CAPS messages. If they write like that, they're probably not worth talking to anyhow.

I keep a decoy address and a real one. Anyone can send mail to spam@itassist.net.au but I don't check it unless I know there will be mail there that I want to read. It's great. I sign up for all the online offers with this address and the crap flows into the box and stays there.

I never type out my real address, although it's not that hard to guess. As a result, I never get spam.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

I have almost trained my friends to the point that they will not forward crap indiscriminately. I have had to abandon one of my favourite email addresses do to an incident similar to what you say, but almost everyone thesedays knows about posting mail where spammers can get to it.

What really bemuses me is that I use this address to post to my local Linux user group (which gets web archived) and I still don't get spam. They must use some pretty heavy-duty anti-spam software.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

I do something similar - I set up a subdomain that's configured to accept anything@, and every time some website wants me to signup and requires me to supply my email, I use <website address>@subdomain as the address. It doesn't stop the random spammers (the people who email sales@, info@, webmaster@ etc) but it's useful for seeing which sites sell my address.

I do something similar to this, except every time i sign up for something, i create an alias, so i can track exactly where the spammer got my address from, then i have good grounds to be bitchy at whatever service i signed up with =)

My mail gets filtered by qmail's rblsmtpd performing reverse DNS lookups at inputs.orbz.org, outputs.orbz.org, dialups.relays.osirusoft.com, and spews.relays.osirusoft.com. Then, after all that, I run my own block list (via DNS, of course) that is self-maintaining. All mail that arrives at one of my several spamcatcher addresses results in the delivering IP address being blocked for 30 days, and the offending message is archived for 90 days. It will also receive bounced mail from any local user, and block the IP address that delivered it into my domain.

This contraption is based upon qmail and rbldns, with lots and lots of perl to handle the self-maintaining list. Eventually I'll get back to the perlTk management interface for the thing... not that I've needed it in the past several months during which it's been keeping my inbox as clear as a mountain stream. :-)

I started out with procmail. Then I discovered mailagent. So I rewired everything to use that, and then have been slowly patching my ".rules" file, which is now up
to 686 lines. But then mailagent got to be too slow for the 1000 or so pieces of email I get every day, so I added a few very-early filters in procmail. Mailagent handles the autoreplies and forwards by itself, but for mail I need to see, delivers to about 50 different ".spool" files, which are then read by GNUS and sorted into their own bins (I don't do any further sorting in GNUS).

When I get about a dozen more TUITs, I'm going to completely eliminate old dead Mailagent with my own tools. There's still things done by mailagent trivially
that the Mail::Audit (and friends) packages don't do, so I've got to handroll
some stuff no matter what. I figure it'll take about a day or so to get right.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other